70 Taliban Killed In Night Battle, NATO Force Says

By ABDUL WAHEED WAFA

Published: October 30, 2006

A battle overnight Saturday in which NATO and Afghan forces engaged suspected Taliban insurgents in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan might have killed as many as 70 insurgents, NATO officials said Sunday.

In a separate incident, NATO said one of its soldiers had been killed and eight more wounded, along with three local Afghan civilians, when their convoy was hit by a roadside bomb.

A statement from NATO said that its troops and Afghan National Army forces had come under fire from between 100 and 150 insurgents near a NATO operating base in the Chora Valley, north of Trinkot, in Uruzgan Province.

The statement said its troops had been backed up by attack helicopters and close air support during a firefight that lasted several hours.

NATO said last week that it had begun a widespread operation with the Afghan Army to try to overwhelm suspected Taliban fighters, especially in volatile regions where the insurgency had been on the rise since the beginning of the year.

A spokesman for the NATO operation, Maj. Luke Knittig, said the troops had been operating with Afghan Army forces north of Trinkot because the insurgents had been treating the area as a safe haven.

The roadside bomb that hit the NATO convoy exploded in an area where Dutch and Australian forces are based. The nationality of the soldier who was killed has not been announced.

Since NATO took over responsibility for the region from American troops at the beginning of August, 52 soldiers have been killed fighting the insurgency.

There also have been civilian casualties in the operation, including dozens of Afghan civilians killed last week in Kandahar Province during an airstrike by NATO planes.

At a news conference on Friday, President Hamid Karzai called for better coordination between Afghan and NATO forces during military operations to avoid civilian deaths.